For some time now, one has attempted to analyze the movements as well as the physical and energy related performances of athletes in motion on a game field. For this purpose, sets of statistical data have been developed which are correlated with medical or physiological data pertaining to athletes, or used for data representation purposes. The usefulness of making real time use of graphic representations of the performances of athletes in order to increase their competitiveness, for educational purposes, or to enhance television broadcasts of sports events is clear, but currently available technology is not capable of providing representations of this type in real time.
The determination of sports related performances of a group of players implies, among others, the problems of determining their respective positions at every instant and, if applicable, the position of the ball on the field as well as the problem of processing the various position related data in order to extract information which is useful to the public and/or the athletes themselves.
Generally speaking, using currently existing technology, the acquisition of sports related performance data (the number of strides, the number of aces scored in tennis, etc.) is handled in a very primitive manner, usually by hand and in time-delayed fashion or otherwise under conditions which have little in common with real world situations, as has been the case of tests carried out in a medical environment.
Furthermore, non-manual acquisition techniques and devices have until now been limited to sports where the efforts are individual without it ever being possible to automatically track, in real time, the positions and the performances of a number of athletes simultaneously in motion on a playing field.
More specifically, in the context of currently existing technology, one is aware of apparatuses and processes aimed at determining the position of a ball on a playing field. Such a process is described in French Patent 2 636 742, whereby one locates an object in motion, i.e., a golf ball, using radio or radar in order to control cameras used for television broadcasts.
However, using a system of this type, it is not possible either to follow the movements of a set of players in real time or to instantly develop a set of statistics which describe the individual performances of each of the players.
It is for this reason that systems known for games which make use of a ball do not allow for automatic real time acquisition and processing of position-related information pertaining to persons in motion on a field. In order to evaluate the performances of these persons, said known systems require manual entry of game events using specific keyboards, the use of the data that was entered to build schedules, statistics or others, which in turn would be used for educational purposes or television broadcasts.